They can't help themselves. Should the way they live their lives ever be questioned, the sky will fall in. For them, nature's law is this: misfortune is a conspiracy against the fortunate. They really think that way. They really believe that no-one needs to be poor, jobless, or otherwise a blot upon their happy vistas. The trickier aspects of the human condition - disability, disease, trauma, the usual effects of capitalism - can then be talked around. Whatever it is, it's your fault.

Personal responsibility is a founding idea for Tories. A person who takes control of his or her life is certain, by definition, to be OK. A person who fails to get a grip has suffered a failure of will and character. If only bootstraps could be pulled a little harder, cloth cut a little closer, and wasters disciplined, all would be well. The unsightly poor would disappear.

Tories are individualists, protective of individual liberties, suspicious of any idea that - but I claim no copyright - we're all in this together. Ask them how much of David Cameron's £30 million fortune was actually made by David Cameron, on an hourly rate, and they will call you ignorant of the perfect mechanisms of a market economy. They will clip you (metaphorically) around the ear.

Iain Duncan Smith likes to boast about his experience of the dole. That was somewhere within his state-subsidised career as a soldier, his time as an arms dealer, his brief spell as a glorified estate agent and his meteoric descent as a politician. Having conquered adversity by selling his talents as an after-dinner speaker, IDS rubs along in a big house on the estate of his father-in-law, Baron Cottesloe. So why can't everyone do the same?

Perhaps because the world is more complicated than the Minister for Work and Pensions would like. Sometimes it is more complex than he is prepared to recognise. When the National Audit Office reports that his pet scheme for universal credit has been an expensive fiasco, IDS runs through excuses like a shifty extra from Only Fools And Horses.

It was those computers, see? No, hold on, it was the civil servants: couldn't run a menage. Guv, it was probably claimants with their complicated lives and their feckless refusal to take up after-dinner speaking. Taking responsibility, like a proper Conservative, IDS has managed to blame everyone but the boss for the outrageous "reform" debacle. Take a stab at guessing who the boss might be.

IDS considers himself a moral sort of man. He doesn't have a view that is not "deeply-held". When he talks of the reasons why an individual might need the state's support he behaves as though offended. He is never upset, however, by the possibility that the plight of millions might just be the consequence of a serf economy. Instead, he blames the serfs, those losers.

One result is that IDS does not pause to think the unthinkable. This is supposed to be a Tory speciality, but it is set aside when careers are at stake. Yet even on a small-scale, 1000-client trial basis in the north of England, universal credit isn't working. Frank Field, Labour's guru in these matters, thinks it can never work. Those who will have to clear up the mess, in the housing charities and the poverty campaigns, dread what will follow if IDS doesn't see reason.

So let's give him a clue. Could it be that universal credit is a stupid idea? Forget that it "enjoys cross-party support" from Labour's useful idiots. Forget that it appeals to the inner bureaucrat in every politician, and to the real bureaucrats who get to play with computers. Misfortune and need come in many forms. Every life is different. So why design a system of social security destined to cause chaos by denying complexity?

How wrong does IDS need to be before Cameron hands out the black spot? The National Audit Office has reported in language ripe with contempt. The civil servants are throwing money at the problem of the minister's reputation. The United Nations has its special rapporteur on housing, Raquel Rolnik, touring Britain's cities to investigate the claim that the bedroom tax is an abuse of human rights. This is third world stuff.

In Glasgow, according to the Office for National Statistics, 30.2% of homes are workless. Voting Labour for decades has not exactly paid off. More to the point, the figure was up in 2012 - from 28.7% the year before - and the greatest number were out of a job because of sickness or disability. This is despite the best efforts of IDS and his hirelings to reclassify illness as a person failure.

The minister is always first in the queue to volunteer budget cuts when George Osborne comes calling. This tells us, first, that IDS is contemptuous of the notion that personal need is best answered with money. That's a large claim from someone living well on his father-in-law's agreeable spread.

Secondly, it reminds us that here is a politician charged with a country's welfare whose policies create the impression that all claimants are, in technical language, at it. In other words, their need is not real. So he presides over a system wholly at odds with reality. But damnable reality persists.

He must have seen that Glasgow statistic. Having done his well-publicised "research" in the city while in opposition, he must know that cutting budets year upon year is, at best, beside the point, not least when your vaunted reforms make matters worse, not better. Now universal credit is "postponed". What happens to the needy in the meantime?

Tories such as IDS these days talk of welfare rather than social security. The language is significant. For them, a human right - and housing is certainly one - amounts to a handout. They forget all of those who paid plenty before they claimed. They forget that their experiments in economic theory have pushed many into the need for which social security was created. Most of all, they forget the nature of humanity.

Why on earth would disability and housing occupy the same administrative box? Who seriously believes that there is any "universal" answer to the unique problems of a single life? If IDS doesn't understand, he should. If he does understand and chooses to ignore the truth, you can draw your conclusions.

Conservatism takes a philosophical view of the individual as he or she stands in a society. There follows an idea of what society means, if it is accepted that such a thing as society exists. Thatcher - and let's not rewrite history - took the easy way out. But the Tory idea of personal liberty never once embraces the belief that there must be freedom from need.

Scotland could do better. Then again, we could hardly do worse if we chose to take proper responsibility for our people. Yet even if we reject the chance of independence, the feral cult of IDS and his kind will have to be challenged.

So return to first principles. The Tory idea that the unlucky can be hosed from the streets doesn't work. It's a waste of time and money. It disputes reality. We are, after all, in this together.

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Excellent article , whether it is Labour or Tory , the bottom line is their policies over a long long time have put the city of Glasgow in the unenviable position of having the highest unemployment in the country.The Black gold revenue has been taken south to build the infrastructure around London while the people of Scotland have been treated as second class citizens.Instead of investing the revenue from Black gold to create a more sustainable future for our country it has been wasted by Incompetent Westminster Governments.Westminster Governments value WMD higher than Scots lives , why else would they say that these WMD are too dangerous to be sited near a populated area and then site them 30 miles from Scotlands largest city.Only an Independent Scotland can create a fairer more equal society
Nobody is saying it is going to be easy and it wont happen overnight but we have the opportunity to change things for the better.Westminster Government does not work for Scotland.
Don't be a dinosaur - Time for change.YES for Scotland.

The Common Weal idea - a framework for social democracy in Scotland - has been given support by the vast majority of SNP councillors and already many SNP MSP's are talking favourably about it. Putting these ideas into practice over a prolonged period of time is the only way to address the chronic problems Mr Bell describes in his article.

Over the last century the Tories have governed Scotland, effectively with no mandate, for around 60% of the time. Even if Labour had, and pursued, social democratic policies for the small windows of time they are in power the Tories would have ample time to dismantle them. To make matters worse Labour appear to have rejected all pretence of having social democratic tendencies at all as they pursue votes in the south east of the UK.

It is clear that Scotlands only chance of becoming a fairer society is to become independent and give Holyrood the mandate to pursue social democratic policies without the distractions and diversions of intervening Tory governments.

Five million people are on unemployment benefits and 1.5 million of them have been on some form of support for more than a decade. A system originally designed to help the poorest in society has trapped them in the very condition it was supposed to alleviate. IDS attempted to introduce a series of reforms intended to make the welfare state both less of a moral hazard and economically viable in the long term. He has also tried to ensure low earners will always be better off in employment. In spite of the relentlessly snide nature of his article I trust Ian Bell recognises we have a problem. Infantilizing the poor as sad creatures incapable of taking any responsibility may make good copy but is this to be Scotland’s solution for what Glasgow shows is THE Scottish problem?

There is a problem John. But you are mistaken if you believe IDS is doing the right thing.

Your angry reaction suggests that Ian's article hit home. Perhaps his comments around the poor simply taking responsibility for themselves and pulling up their bootstraps?

The UK has one of the worst mobility indexes in Europe and a worsening GINI coefficient. This is enough to inform any modern thinker that there is a systemic problem in the UK.

One element is as Ian describes it, a serf economy. Unlike Germany, we failed to reinvest and protect our production and engineering type jobs. Preferring to loose the wide boy spivs in the city of London, on a deregulated Financial Services free for all.

So please, if you are going to get indignant about Ian's article, perhaps you need to consider the problem in the system first, not look to individuals who are struggling on benefits.

Many of these people (I agree not all) paid into the system for years. London got rich on the back of the regions, and working people, not the other way around!

"A system originally designed to help the poorest in society has trapped them in the very condition it was supposed to alleviate." What, all of them? This is the Tory/IDS fallacy. It avoids the bigger picture. They are not trapped by the way welfare works, but by the way our society works. Where are the jobs for them, in the industrial wastelands of the West of Scotland? How exactly should a seriously disabled person get and retain a job? How does someone forced to rely on state benefits find the money to pay extra because that state has suddenly decided their house has too many bedrooms? Just three of the many questions never addressed by conservatives.

You are right in that the system has failed them.The Westminster Government has been responsible for that system for decades and it is clear it is not working for the people of Scotland.Scotlands mineral resources have been wasted by Governments that the people of Scotland did not elect as part of a Union that the people of Scotland were forced to accept.The people of Scotland now have an opportunity to sort out THE SCOTTISH PROBLEM because Westminster has not and never will sort it.They look after their own , its time we did the same.Vote YES for Scotland

With due respect John "Shooting the messenger" is a poor way of addressing a serious matter. Smith is an odious creature and is someone who will cause many people to vote Yes next year despite any other points for or against.

There's an unignorable truth that trips up a lot of unionists, one I've just noticed next door in the letters page. They seem to be fighting for the union and citing their own pet hates as examples of just what is wrong with Scottish nationalism. Whatever their personal poison is, they somehow contrive to conflate it with the independence debate. Their bêtes noires came to be under the Union.They really are struggling, aren't they?

Dr John Tune into the Iplayer of Call Kaye (I think Friday's programme) and listen to the fifty plus year old Father with two degrees and his son with five highers and neither can't get employment. The father has to live on his Job Seekers Allowance! They don;y want to live on benefits but can't find a job. What do they do? Get on their bikes, leave the country or keep trying?

"Scotland could do better. Then again, we could hardly do worse if we chose to take proper responsibility for our people.

This is worth repeating. We cannot do worse than the last 35 years of Westminster during Thatcher and Blair.

"Yet even if we reject the chance of independence, the feral cult of IDS and his kind will have to be challenged".

Another truism that doesn't seem to have hit home yet. Who is going to do this? A broken Labour Party? A Scottish Government with ever decreasing powers? (Curtailed after a No vote)

"So return to first principles. The Tory idea that the unlucky can be hosed from the streets doesn't work. It's a waste of time and money. It disputes reality. We are, after all, in this together.

There is no togetherness between the policies of the Tories in the South and the working people of Scotland. There is no Better Together.... It's going to be Bitter Together (NO) or Better Future (YES)

Insightful and empathetic article as usual Ian. Most of the poor that I know, don't want to be poor or on benefits. It is indeed a poverty trap.

Of course there are people who 'work' this overly complex benefits system, while subsidising themselves on the black economy, but they are not the majority. The majority on benefits are on the breadline, with little hope of upwards mobility, respect or quality of life.

Hi Ian Bell - you are correct that IDS has got some of "it" wrong, but who hasn't? Carefully avoided in your article,( just as politicians find the subject fraught with peril to their ambitions,) are the crucial questions that arise from "we are all in it together" is how much responsibility are each and everyone of us expected to carry, and how and by whom will that be policed? As individuals we make few judgments about our condition in absolute terms, but rather as an on going comparison with things around us. £100 is a lot of money to a beggar, but loose change to a millionaire, and we generally act accordingly. Society as an idea only has dependable worth if most of it's members not only endorse it's values , but make constructive effort to uphold them - otherwise it is one group trying to win advantage over, or from, another. We are instinctively selfish and have to learn co operation and like any behavior requires carrot AND stick for the correct level to arise .
Whilst those at the "top" don't face forfeits or punishments proportional to the rewards they now enjoy, prudent behavior ,as measured collectively, is less encouraged.

Ian Bell makes some pertinent points. However what needs to be pointed out when discussing this issue is that there are long term and short term welfare recipiants.Short term benefit recipients are those who are out of work for a relatively short period of time which could be measured in months or in the current economic climate for a year or two. A year or two too long for most who are desperatly looking for employment that will sustain them.There are many however that have been claiming benefit amounting to hundereds of pounds a week for decades. Many in this group do so because they choose not to work. They are not all in this situation due to disability.There are some issues that make a life on benefit more desiarable than a paid job. A lack of affordable social housing is one of the main ones. Another is that the minimum wage is much too low.That said there are many who do take minimum wage jobs and struggle to live.

Kris, your last sentence pins down the critical issue. IDS and the Tories repeat and repeat the efficacy of being in work, paying taxes and making work pay! How in any economic sense does paying the minimum wage of £6.19 pence per hour make sense? As you correctly say, many work on the minimum wage and struggle to live. IDS openly claimed, if necessary he could live on £37 per week. With that actuarial skill, do you believe one calculation he utters? It's dogma that drives this Coalition. The Scottish Government wants to introduce a "Living Wage". Great, but can't achieve that with the pocket money we get from Osborne and Alexander. Stay in the union and get poorer. Go for Independence and change the system.

There a number of universal benefits that could be scrapped, and concentrated on the less fortunate. The winter fuel allowance, free prescription charges, free nursing care, free bus passes, children's allowance, immediately come to mind. Is everyone irrespective of their income really in need of these, when they are designed to help those on the lower rungs of the income ladder?Giving these benefits to all is not in my mind fair or just. I would be so bold as to suggest that a family on an income of £20,000 has more right to receive these benefits and more, than a family on £50,000. A pensioner on basic pension has more need of free bus passes, and winter fuel allowance, and full free nursing care than one on final salary pension of £50,000.
If IDS really wants to create a more just society he could start with these. He could also try by making sure the party he represents creates the climate where more full time high paid (not minimum wage zero hour contracts) jobs are created. He should ensure his party penalises with heavy fines those bankers, businesses evading tax, and financial fraudsters, change the laws on tax avoidance and ensure the money goes into the welfare coffers. Labour or the SNP in Scotland should not feel smug or free from criticism for it is they who introduced these universal benefits.Saying that these would not have a significant impact on the welfare budget and simply be a gesture is no excuse for starting to create a fairer society. One has to start somewhere and where better than in those I have listed. It is surprising how people will react and start believing in politicians again.

John. There is one compelling reason for universal benefits that trumps all else. If those with money know that they, too, stand to get something back from the State, they are more likely to be prepared to pay more gross tax.And you'll probably find that a good many wealthy pensioners are more than happy to take winter fuel allowances as they can give it to their struggling children and grandchildren.
The important thing that many do not seem to have quite grasped yet, is that the economy would grind to a halt without the poor. The poor spend all their money. Take working tax credits out of the equation and most British High Streets would be closed the next day.

A no vote is for back to the workhouse,which was the lesson learned from the French revolution,keep the poor with full bellies and you stop the revolution,but too many bellies are getting hungry,and too many are educated enough to create change.Independence is the change that is needed.

I live in Glasgow, in a housing 'cocktail' of O/O sandstone terraces (clipped lawns, neat hedgerows) newbuild 'luxury' flats for Up And Comings, rows of older red sandstone flats, and what used to be called council houses and flats bordering a wee 'swing park'.I have had the great good fortune to have worked all my days, as most of my neighbours have/are and the bright new flats are occupied by young(ish) men and women, employed, aspiring, and working every hour that the Chief sends to 'make their way' in the world.If I had a mighty throwing arm I could chuck a stone in one dirction and clatter the windae of one of IDS's 'poor'.The older red sandstone blocks of flats which are I believe 'social housing' as it's now cried, and whether by accident or design (I suspect the latter) seem to have many residents who are unemployed, with a multiple of problems associated with long term poverty..unemployment, chronic illnes, alcohol and drug dependency.The houses bordering the park also seem to have more than their fair share of 'single parents', young women barely out of their teens pushing prams, a toddler scurrying behind them...and soulless young men in track suits and trainers shuffling along the pavement, going to or returning from nowhere in particular.There is a row of shops and businesses beneath the sandstone flats. On the corner, a bookmakers. Next to that, a Chemist's. Then a barber shop. Then a sandwich shop, and takeaway. A charity shop, a newsagent off sales grocer's, an old style Butcher, a Credit Union, a Fish 'n' Chip shop, a Chinese takeaway, and another newsagent off sales grocer's..oh yes and a Hole In The Wall that charges( sorry 'steals') £1.99 for the privilege of withdrawing your own money from some distant bank.I have seen wretched folk in the Chemist's being administered their daily dose of that tell tale heroin substitute, lime green methadone...The newsagents/Off sales /grocers have shelf after shelf of cheap tonic wine, strong lager, and ciders and alcohol/Pop drinks designed to knock the consumer into a very quick stupor..And fags and tobacco...all brands of shag tobacco and cigarette papers...the poor have been priced out of factory made fags...Now let me save the casual reader the time and trouble trying to figure out in which quartier of Glasgow I live...There are dozens of little social and housing clusters like mine all over the city...Bookies, chemists 'convenience' stores where you can conveniently get cheap booze, fags, carry out meals, put on a bet, and get your prescription filled.Politicians in the last 40 years or so, as the Money Men closed our manufacturing industries down and hundreds and thousands of 'real' jobs were transferred to Third World cheap labour bigger profits countries, put a whole generation of skilled and semi-skilled workers on the dole.North Sea Oil was a godsend....Decade after decade of unemployment, with the next generation, and then a third, born into a life of worklessness ; not knowing any better an Underclass grew to believe that it was the state's job to support them, from cradle to grave.They didn't even have to worry about
the rent ...Big Brother will pay..Ian is right..there is no such thing as deserving or undeserving poor...we, as a society, have let this happen...No jobs, real jobs I mean, where people get trained, become journeymen/Women..mechanics, electricians, plumbers, turners, joiners, engineers, because we no longer makes useful things..we are a Service economy, don't you know.Low skilled low paid jobs in supermarkets, burger joints, pubs...at least that's the only GOOJ card for our lost generation of socially engineered poor.And there's precious few of these jobs going around..In the meantime, keep them 'poor, drunk and ignorant' seems to be Glasgow's answer to the dearth of jobs.And Labour politicians with their handsome wages at local and national level... is still not working..Scotland must tackle the disease, not the symptoms.. Independent Scotland must get our people back to work..

John, a tremendous summary of the real Glasgow and this should tell everyone, we are not prepared to tolerate this social decay. An Independent Scotland must have your final sentence indelibly printed on everyone's brain prior to 2014 and after that date as well. How can anyone claim we are Better Together with this truly enlightening post?

I was born in Govan in 1954. From an early age, I witnessed poverty in Kinning Park and Govanhill (where I lived), in Townhead (where went I went to school) and in Castlemilk, Carntyne and Cathcart (where I worked). Poverty in Glasgow has been endemic for hundreds of years, it is as Glaswegian as the Clyde and as old as the Union itself. In my late teens, I looked for the causes of the misery I was witnessing all over my native city. How could a city, the 'Second City of the Empire', the city of 'Tobacco Barons' and shipbuilders, the city of 'The Red Clydesiders' and Labour dominated Councils, bear witness to such misery within its boundaries? It soon became apparent (to me at any rate) that the problem lay not with Glaswegians, but with the people they were electing to represent them in George Square and more importantly the UK Parliament. Labour's litany of ineptitude in Glasgow and the West of Scotland is a shameful episode in Scotland's history. The working poor, the sick, the needy, the vulnerable and the elderly of West Central Scotland have been betrayed by generation after generation of unionist, self serving charlatans who posed as politicians, (predominately Labour politicians) while treating their constituents with contempt and using them as voting fodder.
There are many reasons for voting YES next year, building a socially just Scotland is just one of them.

Bravo, Bill. I'm from Glasgow, too. Left 30 years ago to seek work and landed up here. The WoS Labour tribe is a decrepit but snarling old beast that no longer serves any purpose. Nobody can really remember what it was for - remember, since 1994 an the ending of Clause 4, their founding principles have been nuanced to extinction and impotency, so they have a cheek citing past glories as they've effectively disowned the principles on which the NHS and many other good things were founded. They don't own the NHS, though. Bit like the union, really. Old dogs need put to sleep.

Brilliant article. Trapped on benefit? It's your fault! Not the fault of an iniquitous tax system that makes everything from energy to housing and now, unbelievably, sleeping so expensive that even 7 million people IN work are eligible to claim working tax credit! And who benefits the most from the benefit system? Low wage employers who know the State will subsidise them.

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